PLease try to copy / past the line to your shell consle or SSH client. The bahaviour that you describe happens if you either forgot the closing ' at the end of the line or you use different quotes at the beginning and ending if the command.

This led me into so many new territories, but to take your suggestions, I needed to SSh into the server from my desktop in order to cut/paste. After some learning, I've gotten it and you're correct. Even though it looks correct to me as I typed it into the server directly, I must have made a mistake somewhere!